a_username wrote:I'm running Arch, which has recently pushed GNOME3 out to its general population. After using GNOME3 for a bit, I noticed that pulse was running, but that it wasn't doing anything. OSS4 was still handling all the sound. The thing that tipped me off to this was that the volume buttons on the keyboard were no longer functioning. I still saw the OSD indicating that volume was going up or down, but it was pulse's volume that was changing. After some experimentation, I jumped in and removed pulse.

I can confirm that although GNOME3 lists pulseaudio as a dependency, you don't need it if you've got OSS4. I still have sound in Exaile, VLC, Vbox, Wine, and flash videos. Nothing has exploded. My only issue is that even with pulse totally wiped off the system, I still can't control OSS4's volume with the multimedia keys. I guess I have to go the, "bind scripts to the buttons," route from the FAQ. I'm gonna miss the OSD, though.

You may want to read the old story about PulseAudio, Gnome, multimedia keys etc. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3375 There was even an alternative solution for multimedia keys (Sergey Petrov created a kind of daemon).

The question is: Does it make sense to fix Gnome?Gnome3 is likely to be buggy, it may consume a lot of CPU.You may try a kind of XFCE, or else. XFCE in Arch Linux is also buggy (and all multimedia packages too).

systemd is a replacement for the System V init daemon for Linux...cgroups are used to track service processes, instead of PIDs. This means that daemons cannot "escape" systemd even by double-forking...Arch Linux has experimental packages in the community repository for the systemd itself and a set of basic units. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

Poettering touches some interesting points here. We have a family of standards that are known as POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface for uniX), defining the API of a Unix operating system. However, the POSIX specifications are not carved in stone and there are few operating systems that are fully compliant (Mac OS X is one of them since the Leopard release). http://lwn.net/Articles/429597/

It is not a joke. "It's just a statement of fact, as a warning. Thinks like locale, certain udev rules, udisks, SMART, the pci db, the usb id, and a lot more have been broken since about always on seperate /usr. The only thing that is new here is that we now print a warning that things are broken. The fact that it is broken didn't change." (Lennart Poettering http://lwn.net/Articles/429695/#Comments )

systemd will warn you during boot if /usr is on a different file system than /. While in systemd itself very little will break if /usr is on a separate partition many of its dependencies very likely will break sooner or later in one form or another. For example udev rules tend to refer to binaries in /usr, binaries that link to libraries in /usr or binaries that refer to data files in /usr. Since these breakages are not always directly visible systemd will warn about this, since this kind of file system setup is not really supported anymore by the basic set of Linux OS components.http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/tree/README

log_warning("/usr appears to be on a different file system than /. This is not supported anymore. "- "Some things will probably break (sometimes even silently) in mysterious ways.");+ "Some things will probably break (sometimes even silently) in mysterious ways. "+ "Consult http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/separate-usr-is-broken for more information."); }

It is not necessary to install it on your computer. You can try this really exotic innovation on Arch LiveCD viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3933#p17359 (read this: 2. Installing Arch Linux on a USB key)CTKArch LiveCD has yaourt inside. Just type on terminal "yaourt systemd".

Fedora 15 branch includes systemd as default and I don't see any reason it wouldn't be released that way. If you want to try it out, Fedora 15 alpha release is coming out shortly http://lwn.net/Articles/429695/#Comments

Warning!If you want to quickly try out systemd, it may be a good idea to create a "sandpit" system for the purpose (e.g. a virtual machine that you can easily re-install or delete afterwards). If you are installing systemd on a system containing data that you care about, please take a full backup first, and make a plan for restoring from backup in the event that the system ends up unbootable.https://wiki.ubuntu.com/systemd#Warning ... ental_code

SystemD has not yet been implemented in Arch Linux, but it is going to be implemented in the nearest future. That is why Arch Linux users have already problems with udevviewtopic.php?f=3&t=4372#p17360 The reason is simple. The developers are hacking udev (and everything else) to fix bugs in SystemD.

SystemD and PulseAudio are perfect by definition, because they are "very advanced". However, any other Linux software is buggy, unreliable, and imperfect (by definition). That is why ignorant Linux users have problems with PulseAudio and SystemD. The advanced Linux users, of course, have no problems with "advanced innovations". This might be obvious.

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a Linux feature that provides a mechanism for supporting access control security policies...Originally developed primarily by the United States National Security Agency [NSA], it [SELinux] was released to the open source development community under the GNU GPL on December 22, 2000 and merged into the mainline kernel 2.6.0-test3, released on 8 August 2003... (SELinux has been integrated into version 2.6 series of the Linux kernel, and separate patches are now unnecessary)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

SystemD is, no doubt, very advanced, and the most advanced Linux technologies are usually produced by the ancient method of imitation invented in the Stone Age. (In our day, the most exact method of imitation was re-invented by Baron von Googleberg http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04 ... ok_loving/ ). In Linux-speak, "innovation" means "imitation" (if not "plagiarism"):

The road forward for systemdThere are many new features in systemd, but the core change is a concept stolen from the MacOS launchd daemon - and from others that came before launchd. https://lwn.net/Articles/389149/

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

In short, SystemD is a very advanced imitation of the MacOS launchd daemon. Imitation means Cargo Cult, of course. This was clearly explained by Richard Feynman:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas – he's the controller – and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

launchd is a unified, open source service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, applications, processes, and scripts. Written and designed by Dave Zarzycki at Apple, it was introduced with Mac OS X Tiger and is licensed under the Apache License...By consolidating all the launch services into one program, launchd significantly shortens boot time on slow computers...launchd has two main tasks. The first is to boot the system, and the second is to load and maintain services...Mac OS X Tiger boots much faster than previous releases. The system only has to register the daemons that are to run, not actually launch them.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd

Debian Wiki: Cargo CultThis resembles cargo cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult) religions: that is, apt-get is the visible aspect of Debian's policy system, the same way that cargo-cult practices saw runways and other characteristics as the source of western goods ("cargo"), and built their own replicas, complete with fake wooden headphones for control towers. In the same way, other distributions have created the shallow visible aspect of Debian's packaging infrastructure, without addressing the deep issues of policy. http://wiki.debian.org/WhyDebian#Qualit ... ementation

You see, cargo-cult style imitation is a well-established tradition in Linux. What is more, a resort to cargo-cult style imitation seems inevitable. The reason is simple. If you are not able to develop Linux, you have to imitate "development and innovations". Otherwise, it might be obvious that "the king is nude" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes

Notice that launchd is "open source", it is easy to imitate, although, of course, the Linux developers may need 5 years of "hard thinking" to understand how it works (they should study the source code, etc.).

SystemD is, no doubt, much more advanced than Upstart. The purpose of Upstart is to shorten boot time on slow computers. Canonical Ltd. created Upstart for Ubuntu in 2006, because Apple created the MacOS launchd daemon in 2005. Upstart was said to be "advanced", and, therefore, it was implemented in all "advanced" Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. However, Upstart has not been implemented in Arch Linux, and, not surprisingly, Arch Linux boots much faster than Ubuntu. If you disable UDev, Arch Linux boots even faster. To shorten boot time on slow computers, you do not even need to disable UDev completely, it is sufficient to load drivers before UDev starts its "auto-loading business" viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4372#p17360

Taking into account the experience of PulseAudio, it is not difficult to predict that SystemD may significantly slow down the boot process on slow computers and cause unpredictable system failures on any computers not only "on startup or on reboot/shutdown".

The efficacy of innovations is a matter of belief rather than a matter of fact, because "facts" can be easily falsified. If you do not know how to falsify facts, you may study a handbook on Semiology. It is very simple. Falsified facts constitute a "myth", but this myth has to be consumable by design.

It is at the level of secondary signification or connotation that myth is produced and consumed... Making a choice between the word 'terrorist' and the phrase 'freedom fighter" is to begin to load a statement with connotations... 'Terrorists carried out an attack on an army base today.' Substitutions from the paradigmatic axis could alter the meaning of this sentence [and the meaning of the 'fact'] considerably. If we substitute 'freedom fighters' or 'anti-imperialist volunteers' for the word 'terrorists' we would have a sentence meaningful in quite a different way. This would be achieved without any reference to a corresponding reality outside of the sentence itself.John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (1993).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture

If you do not want to study Semiology, you can simply tweak the system in some way and tell that it now boots much faster, because it has (or has not) some "very advanced" daemons. This myth should be consumable, because daemons, by their very nature, are "invisible mystical entities", "invisible magic forces", "supernatural beings", "evil spirits", etc. Similar "daemons" are to be found in economic science: invisible (or impersonal) market forces, invisible hands, etc. This is because economics is an "exact science" just like physics: invisible electromagnetic forces, Maxwell's daemon, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_demonThe word "daemon" proved to be very effective in production of "facts" and "scientific knowledge" (according to Plato, "knowledge is a justified true belief" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosishttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowl ... lysis/#JTB ), largely because, perhaps, it invokes a powerful archetype of classical mythology: a system (or a person) is somehow "possessed" by a "guiding daemon".

In the Hellenistic ruler-cult that began with Alexander himself, it was not the ruler but his guiding daemon that was venerated, for in Hellenistic times, the daimon was external to the man whom it inspired and guided, who was "possessed" by this motivating spirit. Similarly, the first-century Romans began by venerating the genius of Augustus, a distinction that blurred in time.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(cl ... _mythology)

This may explain the cult of the MacOS launchd "open-source" daemon which has been venerated by the Linux developers since 2005.

Although computer scientists are not, as a rule, very knowledgeable in the fields of Anthropology and Theology, they have already noticed some very strange tendencies in software engineering:

Such curiosities like "slavish imitation" may happen when a software developer is possessed by a wrong daemon. To be able to innovate, you have to be possessed by the spirit of innovation (e.g. the spirit of MacOS) just like the Papuans of the true faith had been possessed by the spirits of the taro. An immediate result of the Taro cult was a very advanced innovation in the native agriculture:

It is quite generally professed that oft-repeated shaking makes the taro grow; indeed, an expert may go into the gardens to shake amid the vegetables with the express purpose of benefiting them... There is a wide class of Taro experts or special exponents of the cult... The are some who are recognized as leaders and who are very strongly 'possessed'... Such men, who, like the Baigona men, might be called priests of the cult [or cult developers], officiate and lead in the ceremonial feasting; they perform certain duties in the taro gardens; they make a special practice of jipari and similar contortions; and they subject themselves to certain taboos. The theory of their conduct is that of possession by a spirit, either of the taro itself or of the dead...The innumerable followers of the [Taro] movement indulged in various kinds of foolish antics, with reeling, staggering, and a violent shaking of the head and limbs known as jipari. There was no attempt to control these actions – rather the contrary – and they commonly ended in mild contortions and paroxysms... We have seen that whole villages may be at times simultaneously overtaken by the shaking-fit. With the rank an file who fall victims to the jipari in its collective form, I believe the symptoms are largely involuntary... The ordinary villager is prone to fall into a shaking-fit if others are doing so...The native theory of jipari is one of possession. The subject is possessed by the atiti or spirit, either of the taro itself or of a dead man... The shaking-fit is due to the immanence of the atiti. It is felt, not seen... The genuine shaking-fit only follows, or rather accompanies, possession... The Vailala Madness and the Taro cult have each in their time and place made a veritable conquest, a kind of bloodless victory in which innovation has met with welcome rather than resistance.Francis E. Williams. Orokaiva Magic (1928).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vailala_Madness

The economic efficacy of innovations was rather obvious, for it was believed that the oft-repeated ritual of jipari makes the vegetables grow, and the belief itself was reinforced through the oft-repeated experience of jipari. In short, the "objective truth" can only be established through oft-repeated rituals, although, of course, the ritual technology may depend on cultural traditions, it might be jipari, or "scientific conference" (such as Linux conferences, economics conferences, theological conferences, and the like) or else.

To be affected by the jipari, or "scientific conference", a person should be sufficiently "cultivated and refined" (in terms of a particular culture), he should be properly educated to be able to perceive the "objective truth". As it was explained by natives themselves, the heads of the "possessed" were "soft" (saurapa). The natives, who had been educated in missionary schools, were, as a rule, strongly "possessed", since "the schoolboys who learnt readily were those with the soft heads" (Francis E. Williams. Orokaiva Magic, 1928). Whether or not the ritual of jipari (in its collective form) was somehow introduced by Christian missionaries, it is, in fact, very similar to the ritual of collective jerking (the Scotch-Irish Revival in Kentucky in 1800):

Next to the 'falling' exercise the most notable and characteristic Kentucky phenomenon was the 'jerks'. The unhappy victim shook in every joint. Sometimes the head was thrown from side to side with great rapidity. Again the feet were affected, and the subject would hop like a frog... Peter Cartwright declares that he had seen more than five hundred persons jerking at once in his congregation.Frederick M. Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals (1905).

Swoons and convulsive fallings have not been without precedent, but what is known as the jerks was altogether unprecedented in Christian lands. The person was instantaneously seized with spasms or convulsions in every muscle, nerve, and tendon. The head was jerked and thrown from side to side with such rapidity that it was impossible to distinguish the visage, and the most lively fears were awakened lest the neck be dislocated or the brains dashed out... The barks frequently accompanied the jerks, though of later origin. The exercise consisted of an individual taking the position of a dog, moving about on all fours, snapping the teeth, and barking, with such exactness of imitation to deceive any one whose eyes were not directed to the spot. The persons frequently affected were the most cultivated and refined. Those affected by trances and who saw visions were innumerable. http://www.pbministries.org/History/Joh ... rt3_04.htm

The Second Great Awakening was a Christian religious revival movement during the early 19th century in the United States, which expressed Arminian theology by which every person could be saved through revivals. It enrolled millions of new members, and led to the formation of new denominations. Many converts believed that the Awakening heralded a new millennial age. The Second Great Awakening stimulated the establishment of many reform movements designed to remedy the evils of society before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening

How many Linux users are there?

The Cargo Cult of Business: EU to Admit LinuxBrussels, Belgium, 15 March 2006 - In a surprise move today, the EU Council of Ministers announced it was approving the admission of Linux to the EU, with full voting status. This marks the first time the EU has admitted a non-nation-state entity to its ranks.

Linux is installed on nearly 300 million machines worldwide, according to IDC. Revenue growth is forecasted to be above 20% CAGR for at least the next five years...

PulseAudio seemed to be an obvious proof of the incompetence of Linux technocratic elite. As a result, the number of Linux Desktop users became insignificantly small (about 1% by very optimistic estimations) http://lwn.net/Articles/447576/

Focusing on the next Linux clientby Dave McAllister, June 14, 2011Way back in 1999 I predicted a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. (I was targeting better than Mac OS type numbers, in the 10-15% range.) It was clear back then that Linux had found a substantial adoption as a server OS, and it seemed only time before the desktop adoption rivaled at least “the other desktop”.Obviously I was wrong....with Desktop Linux, we see a basically flat growth curve hovering around 1%. And since the release of AIR, we’ve seen only a 0.5% download share for desktop Linux. http://blogs.adobe.com/open/2011/06/foc ... lient.html

Dave McAllister made such optimistic predictions in 1999, simply because a certain hacker-messiah, Eric S. Raymond, publishes an essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (1997), which became a New Testament of Cargo Cult Software Engineering. It appeared to be capable of provoking the jipari, or shaking-fit (in its collective form), and therefore, it was "presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg and was published as part of a book of the same name in 1999" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathed ... the_Bazaar This messianic message inspired a new Cargo Cult, which was documented in a movie "Revolution OS" (2001) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_OS "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" does contain the true secret of Cargo, but it seems to be misunderstood by the Linux developers (this might be proved with mathematical exactitude).

Raymond's models of how the open source community works were influenced by an early draft of a paper by Keith Henson describing religious fervor as an overstimulation of evolved responses to social status rewards... Raymond became a prominent voice in the open source movement and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He also took on the self-appointed role of ambassador of open source to the press, business and public. The release of the Mozilla (then Netscape) source code in 1998 was an early accomplishment. Raymond has spoken in more than fifteen countries on six continents, including a lecture at Microsoft...He has rejected what he describes as the "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, asserting that this is "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Ra ... pen_source

Since the promised miracles invariably failed to happen, the Adobe experts corrected their predictions in 2011 (although they had been faithfully waiting for miracles to happen since 1999). You see, they are very impatient, they couldn't wait a while longer. However, our brothers in Vanuatu are still waiting for the second coming of John Frum (although they have waited since 1945). If you would tell them that John may never return, the faithful would explain that the Christians have waited two thousand years for Jesus Christ to return, and, therefore, the natives should "wait a while longer for John Frum" (Lamont Lindsrom, Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond, 1993).

Perhaps, the Linux developers may better imitate Android OS instead of Mac OS. For example, each Linux distro may fork the Linux kernel, libraries, Xorg, ALSA and other apps (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, etc.) to unleash "creative chaos" and "spontaneous innovations". The word "fork" means "bifurcation" ("division into two branches or parts") in this particular case. It is a nonlinear phenomenon. There is a mathematical theory for this (with exact mathematical models) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_theory It is related to the so-called "chaos theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory and "catastrophe theory" ("In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory). There is already a scientific discipline, the Anthropology of Linux (with mathematical models, etc.).

“If we learn anything from history, it is that we learn nothing from history” (Psalm 78:12-39). One of the lessons that we could learn (if we were able to learn) it that a dramatic failure of a cult may cause a "great schism", or even a sudden catastrophic disunion of the cult community into a large variety of "heretic sects".

Since the Linux developers are not likely to be able to learn from experience, they continue to imitate MacOS in a desperate effort to save Linux http://piestar.net/2010/03/23/cargo-cult-usability/It is not difficult to predict that SystemD may force many system administrators to switch to FreeBSD, and the number of Linux servers may fall to zero.

You may surely have a lot of fun with your Debian server. If systemd hangs on startup, it means that your Linux server is unbootable, or sometimes unbootable, when systemd hangs on startup. It might be difficult to forecast this phenomenon without debugging. Don't worry! The art of debugging is not a "rocket science".

The problem is that Cargo Cultists are not able to learn from experience, because "they're missing something essential". That is why our brothers in Vanuatu are waiting for John Frum's Cargo planes since 1945 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1skNgYdJXK8They keep innovating, of course, inventing new ritual techniques and occult ceremonies in the hope to materialize their Utopian dreams. They "may whirl, shake, chant, dance, foam at the mouth, or couple promiscuously in agitated attempts to obtain the cargo they want, not from a shop or trade store, but directly from the mystical source supposedly responsible for manufacture and distribution" (Kenelm Burridge, Mambu. A Melanesian Millennium. 1960)

A variety of desires for collective benefit coupled with apparently irrational strategies to attain those desires have attracted the label cargo cult... Most often, cargo-cult labeling highlights an irrationality of practice rather than sorry futures. The cargoistic Tannese, advises the Economist, should 'first master the fax" (1991, 20). Tragedy, here, transforms into comedy, sometimes even mean irony.Lamont Lindsrom, Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (1993).